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Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic and Relationships

Children go through ups and downs like everyone else. But even in elementary school, some children are shy and awkward, and they can easily become social outcasts, anxious about social interactions and maybe a tad depressed. Normal adolescent angst can spiral out of control for these young people, taking them on a trajectory that can lead to major depression by adolescence — unless, research suggests, they have a simple but valuable asset: a friend.

Just one friend is enough, a new observational study suggests, to buffer an anxious, withdrawn child against depression. And it doesn’t have to be a particularly close friend — not an intimate or a confidant, as an adult would understand it, just some kind of social connection with someone their own age. Having at least one friend — defined as someone who counted them as a friend in return — seemed to put the brakes on the downward slide toward depression during the pre-teenage years.

Children who were completely isolated and had no friends at any point in the two-year study were at highest risk of sliding into depression as they made their way through the teenage years, said Dr. William M. Bukowski, professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal and lead author of the report, which was published in the journal Development and Psychopathology.

He suggests parents, teachers and schools are often so focused on academic achievement that they overlook a key tool to keeping children emotionally healthy through adolescence, something that may be more effective than medication or talk therapy. “Schools are naturally keen to promote kids’ academic achievement,” Dr. Bukowski said, “but friendship is something that teachers might want to pay attention to. It’s an important value. People have often said it should be the fourth R; that after ‘reading, writing, ‘rithmetic,’ it should be ‘relationships.’”

“For me, the real practical issue is one that may sound sort of simplistic, but since we all desire to prevent these problems from happening, one thing we need to be doing is putting a value on friendship for children,” he added. “When you look at the effect of certain mental health interventions, teaching children to manage their anxieties and changing the way children think about their experiences, and so forth — the effect of having a friend is so great that it wouldn’t surprise me to see that having a friend is going to be as powerful as the effect of some treatments. Just having one friend really pushed these at-risk kids right off the downward trajectory.”

The study observed about 230 boys and girls in the third, fourth and fifth grades in a small town in Maine, and followed them until they were in middle school in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades. The researchers assessed them three times, primarily through questionnaires filled out by the children themselves, repeated at 12-month intervals. The students were asked who their friends were, and researchers later cross-checked to see which of them had named each other, to verify that those children were indeed friends.

The students also assessed their classmates’ social skills, describing which peers had their “feelings hurt easily” or were “sad,” and whether they themselves felt shy or liked being left alone; researchers used the answers to assign scores to all the children.

Generally, the children who were social outcasts or shy and withdrawn were most likely to have a sad affect, and their depression snowballed over the next two years — generally, that is, unless they had a friend. If they had a friendship at any time during the study, their depression didn’t spiral out of control and their depressive affect declined. The friendship seemed to protect them and impart a certain psychological resilience.

“This study points to some things that those of us who work with adolescents especially know: by the time kids become depressed, they either have not had friends for a long time or they’re losing their friends,” said Dr. Anne Marie Albano, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University-New York State Psychiatric Institute. “And one of the things we do is try to activate them to engage with people. And the tougher kids to work with are the kids who didn’t have friends to begin with.”

Parents should pay attention if their children lack social interaction and not assume it’s something that’s “just a phase,” she said. But, she added, it’s hard to know which comes first, the sad affect and withdrawal or the lack of friends, and it’s possible the children in the study who had at least one friend were able to sustain a friendship because they were healthier to begin with.

Dr. Bukowski concedes that there comes a time in a child’s life when parents can no longer set up play dates and have to stand back from a child’s social life. But, he said, parents can still encourage friendships and talk to their children about how to develop and negotiate relationships.

“With older kids, the parent’s role changes, you’re less of a manager and more of a coach,” he said.

I think this is true for adults too! Our community works hard to foster relationships (game nights, potlucks, walk to school clubs, fitness group) for both children and adults. And we talk about friendship at these events. Friendship, for me, makes all the difference in my mental health.

Another reminder that friendship for both adults and children is intimately related to all aspects of a healthy life. It reinforces your previous NYT article ‘A New Risk Factor: Your Social Life’, where it says “social relationships are just as important to health as other common risk factors like smoking, lack of exercise or obesity,… new research shows people who have strong ties to family, friends or co-workers have a 50 percent lower risk of dying over a given period than those with fewer social connections”

I don’t see much of difference between children and grown ups. Humans are inherently social beings and as such they feel mortar when excommunicated. The main difference is that children are being taught for tolerance and creating healthy relationships with others while adults turn to various coaching or psychologists in other cases when looking for guidance and solutions.

Friendship is a bumpy road for a child in American culture that all must trek for survival.
Just the mobility of American families — the need to move or change schools — can be a social impediment or agonist to making and keeping friends. It doesn’t always have the same effect. Some kids become extra outgoing and make friends easily in a new place. Some kids start out shy and stay that way.
Often kids mirror their own parents and siblings social patterns falling into similar grooves that vary widely from people who are gregarious to ones who have primarily one BFF and the rest acquaintances.
The friendships that start in nursery school and continue to high school are precious, but very rare. If they exist they should be respected and nurtured.
My experience as a child of the ’50s was that we left the house in the morning for school or play with the neighborhood floating collective of friends that was more Spanky and Our Gang than Mean Girls. The idea of a “play date” organized by your mother or father was absurd. Never even heard of it until I moved to the big cities. I still have never heard of a great and lasting friendship resulting from a manufactured play-date.
The other reality is that the friend scheme and dynamics change with maturity. Geographic friend connection with nearby neighbors often gets upended by the larger friend pool in Middle School and High School. The shifts can be brutal and heartbreaking, but they cannot be controlled by parents. By then kids should have some social skills to make acquaintanceships, form alliances, ward off bullies and find pals. When two shy kids find each other as friends heaven smiles down. A romance between two social outcasts is a cause for celebration — or maybe an independent film!

What would actually be more helpful, and productive, is if kids who made friends easily were more generous with the kids who are shy, or who miss signals, or who seem oblivious to others feelings. Children are smart enough to identify the kids who don’t fit with the group, and they are quick enough to exclude them for being ‘weird’ or a ‘downer’. And then the onus is put on the children who are that socially apt to break through and be included? Not surprisingly it’s a downward spiral. For all the talk of ’empathy,’ the kids who have the most ’empathy’ are incredibly cruel and unsympathetic. As a culture, we place a high value on exclusivity and this is damaging to a segment of children- many of whom have very valuable skills to share, and who, if given the chance, exhibit true empathy and caring, and are very loyal friends. It would be nice if the more socially astute people would take some responsibility for their role in this, but I won’t hold my breath.

I’m eternally grateful to the middle school counselor who suggested to another girl that she make friends with me. I had been dumped by my previous best friend the year before and didn’t really have any friends. High school turned out to be some of the best years of my life, and we’re still friends now, decades later.

I’m curious, did the study only evaluate in-school friendships for the students? did it ask about outside of school friendships like at church, neighbors, etc.? I wonder if the study says something about the kid specifically having an ally at school.

Honestly, it makes me sad to think there at 10 year olds who can go through a 2 year period without having a single friend. That is a crushing, depressing thing to think about.

The conclusion the post seems to focus on is parental methods of dealing with such lack of socialization. But I can’t help but wonder if such parents haven’t fostered such lack of socialization. You don’t just end up with a 10 year old that has no friends and can’t socialize.

I think it is sort of sad that we need experts to come tell us that friendships are important for kids. Have we so lost sight of the big picture that it was not obvious to us, as individuals, and as communities?

In terms of advice for parents, I sort of felt like this article fell short of the mark. I’m not sure how much teens will listen to us when we try to “guide” them in how to be good friends. I certainly never listened to my parents.

I think what parents CAN do is provide lots of opportunities for friendships to occur, by exposing their kids to lots of different other kids and making their budding friendships accessible to them. In other words, if your child clicks with Joe who lives an hour away, then make time to drive your child to Joe’s house on a weekend, or make the car available so he can drive himself. To be honest, I think it is as important for parents to give teens access to friend time as it is to give them family time. After all, teens are growing up to move AWAY from their families and develop their own lives.

Along those lines, I think one thing schools can do is reduce the parental burden of education management. It annoys me when the school sends home so much paper that I spend 30 minutes just organising, cataloging, and reading it. It annoys me that they send home so much homework that the parents all have an unspoken agreement that there are no playdates on weekdays (so the kids can get their homeowork done). Parents need to have free time in which to get their kids to and from playdates, and kids need to have free time to spend building relationships with each other, and oh by the way, maybe if they had time to play after school, they wouldn’t all be becoming obese! We could kill two birds with one stone.

The other big factor thrown into the mix now are social interaction sites like Facebook and texting that create the foundations of friendships often even beyond the experience of their parents. Who is a parent today who was texting when they were a teen? Even if they text with THEIR friends or Crackberry heads, it’s not the same.
It does not defy understanding, but it adds in new factors of independence and control. Who pays for the cell and web services? How loose is the electronic leash?
These are just more reasons why parents should tread carefully in the world of modern teen social relations. How much you can grasp of what is going on with Jersey Shore might give you some indication of your level of social wisdom? Gangs, tribes and posses have their own conventions and justice that must be considered and respected.
Interventions by parents either for social engineering ought to be restrained and kids ought to be seriously consulted before any parent begins mucking about directly with their friends — or enemies.
In this regard, parent’s best play is to demonstrate their own social skills with their peers in the neighborhood, at work, in church or with the extended family.

Us parents of children with developmental disabilities have seen this first hand. Very often our kids have no friends, especially after they get past the age when parents set up play dates for them.
Once they get into later elementary school, middle school, and beyond, their lags in social skills means they have no friends.
We can see how hard this is for the children, and we know it’s more important in many ways than conventional academics.

This touches a nerve. One of the real drawbacks in my life so far is not cultivating and keeping friendships — thru lack of my own effort. (Not blaming anyone here, and not feeling sorry for myself–just stating facts.) I’m so independent and happy with my own company that I have never really understood the importance (at a deep emotional level) of working to maintain friendships. And I know that this hurts me. Not to mention how people feel when I lose contact with them.

When I see articles about how friendships and relationships enhance and possibly lengthen life, I have this uncomfortable, knowing sense that I am creating a life that will not feature this.

I did struggle mightily with forming friendships in grade school. To my teachers’ credits (and this is back in the early-mid 70’s), they saw this, and always paid attention to this issue and expressed concern about this to my parents (who also took it seriously). Those around us recognize the importance of human ties and don’t ignore it, in my experience. But it is up to us friendship-challenged people, individually, to take the guidance and advice and employ it.

Um, shouldn’t the schools figure out how to teach reading and math competently first? It sounds like they’ve realized it’s hard to teach people to read and compute and want credit for teaching “relationships” instead.

As a taxpayer, I don’t want to pay taxes to teach another generation of illiterate, innumerate schoolchildren, no matter how good they are at “relationships.”

A key to allowing children to develop friendships is giving them space in the school day to do so. I’m talking about recess. What was once free, ungoverned time for kids to use how they wished, is increasingly reduced to a token 15 minute breather, barely enough time to start a conversation or follow an idea to its conclusion. Worse, at many (most?) schools, recess is being squeezed out altogether by “requirements”, i.e. teaching to the test. And the scores aren’t rising. Go figure.

When I think back to school, I don’t remember the lessons or the details. Sure, that stuff went in, and it’s still there. But I remember the lunchtime hours spent outside with my peers, skipping, gossiping, reading, walking, running, climbing trees, playing, hiding, and sharing secrets and dreams and problems and ideas. Just breathing, and being human. It made school bearable, and taught me much else besides.

More interestingly, the whole school was out for lunch & recess at the same time, so I could check in with my siblings, chat with younger kids, seek intellectual peers among the older kids. Teachers ambled around, breaking up arguments and bandaging skinned knees, but mostly leaving us to ourselves. There was a vigorous and warm democracy in that kingdom of children. We learned how to make and break friendships, and that there were always more people out there with whom we might form a bond, whether temporary or longterm.

Will it take a mental health epidemic a generation hence of alienated, unhappy young adults for us to realize that, in depriving children of unstructured personal time during the day, we have compromised their education and their personhood — and thus our larger social fabric — at the most fundamental level?

Similar to S in comment #12, we have a classified son who is now 14 and in 9th grade. He has always struggled socially, and we are beyond the time when we should arrange play dates. We strongly encourage activities that put him in a situation in which he is likely to interact with his peers. It is painful to realize he has no friends to go out and have fun with on weekends. I hope as he matures, he will develop friendship skills that come naturally to most kids.

Seems like a circular problem, though. That is, if you were the sort of person to have friends, you would have friends already, and if you aren’t, people telling you that having friends is a good thing is pretty useless. After all, you can’t exactly pick up a new friend or two at the store. (Though you can at the animal shelter.)

“Dr. Bukowski said, “but friendship is something that teachers might want to pay attention to. It’s an important value. People have often said it should be the fourth R; that after reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, it should be, ‘relationships.’”

I had a teacher friend look at this. Her comments pretty much came down to this: “My academic dance card is already full. If I can facilitate friendships between students in a spontaneous manner…fine. I’m happy to do it. But I don’t want it as part of my agenda and regimen”. Also, “Involvement can lead to irate parents that don’t welcome your efforts regarding the personal relationships of their children”. Rock and a hard place.

This is probably next to impossible, but if the “popular” leaders in the student body can somehow be compelled to develop a magnanimous and inclusive attitude towards the shy, reserved, and/or geeks… this would be a powerful front-line tool in exacerbating the solitude of the friendless. I know, an unrealistic expectation and/or goal.

Though the school that I attended was a private parochial school… it was tough. And I was considered to be tough. Hence, I got left alone, and others sought out my friendship.

New kid comes to school. A harmless geek. (geek: Urban Dictionary Definition: 1. “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult”.) Cute, isn’t it?

He was smart, and knew a lot about science. His father was one (a scientist) at MIT. I liked science. I had no problem shooting the breeze with him. But he wasn’t a “get together on the weekend” or a regular hang-out with friend. Once he opened up a bit, he had a scathing sense of humor. I liked that too.

He attended the school for one year. I protected him… as much as I could. One day, another boy (further down in the hierarchy) mocked me for talking to a geek. He never mocked me again… and afterwards avoided me as much as was possible… if you get my drift. And I got suspended from school for a day (which was more of a boon than it was a punishment). The word was out to… “Leave the geek alone”.

He told me that his mother and father wanted to meet me. I went to his house after school (I was interested to meet a real-deal rocket scientist). (He was in physics)

They both thanked me for befriending their son. I felt guilty because he wasn’t really my friend. Part of my impetus for protecting him was, it pissed me off that anyone would try to influence who I liked or didn’t like… or who I talked to or didn’t talk to. In some ways, it was more about me than it was about him.

The father showed me his home lab in the basement. He told me that I had made a big difference in his son’s life. More guilt.

The article mentions… “ Just one friend is enough, a new observational study suggests, to buffer an anxious, withdrawn child against depression. And it doesn’t have to be a particularly close friend — not an intimate or a confidant, as an adult would understand it, just some kind of social connection with someone their own age.”

I guess that’s what I was, to this kid. He was lucky that that particular year I was riding high in the hierarchy. King of the Mountain one year… and the next year, shoveling ##it agains the tide, at the bottom of the heap.

I think that this is especially true for high schoolers and college students. When I first started exhibiting signs of depression, my friends were the first to notice, even though at that point we weren’t as close as before because I had isolated myself so much. Even though my interest in socializing was at an all time low, knowing they were there helped me get through some rough high school years.

There seems to be a real lack of information on HOW children are supposed to foster relationships. I remember having a good friend in 5th grade who completely turned against me, treated me horribly, etc. but I was too afraid to say something and I was more afraid of not having a friend.

I agree with #15 (jg) – without time and space for kids to play and learn it’s really difficult for relationships to grow and be HEALTHY.

Yes, connections to other human beings is hugely important but need not be peers–teachers, parents, siblings, other adults, extended family. This has been a concern, as I have been home schooling my 12-year-old son this year, so many people who have been against it–some asked, some not–have played the social card. And social does matter and academics at the expense of that (and other things that increase quality of life) is a terrible disservice, but–speaking from personal and observational experience–schools may always be social but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing. This has been sore spot with me //learnmeproject.com/?p=32, the issue of kids and other kids is so often over-simplified, we’ve got to see the big, the long-term, picture //learnmeproject.com/.

My daughter qualifies as a high functioning autistic and never had a easy time socializing. I only wanted one good friend for her. Her peers didn’t dislike her, they just didn’t include her and it took my secret intervention to make sure she had friends to go to the prom with. Kids who make friends easily should be taught to show kindness to those who don’t, to reach out to kids who become excluded. . Like comment 17, if you can’t make friends being told that it’s healthy to have friends is useless.

I taught in the Japanese public school system for 3 years. All students are encouraged to join a club regardless of ability: mostly sports clubs but also band, rock band etc..So there is an automatic chance for camaraderie and socialization. I organized an informal video movie club for interested kids who didn’t fit the regular clubs. But this kind of partial solution to socializing kids requires time & energy from teachers and respect and commitment from students.

The times I was the most proud of my children was when they were kind and stood up to bullies. One example was when my 8th grade daughter bought a Christmas gift for an outcast, ridiculed 7th grader, and presented her gift with a hug to the younger student in front of the bullies. I would hope we all raise our children to care about others and help those who need it. When good people see evil and do nothing….

I was a very socially awkward child and spent a good deal of my childhood friendless. It was painful, but I really didn’t know how to make friends. It seem to come so naturally to other people, but I just didn’t know how (and I’m still pretty inept at it as an adult!).

Yes, I was depressed as a tween and teenager, and my lack of friends certainly contributed to that.

Now, I’m married with a daughter of my own. I want her to be a confident and popular girl, but I don’t know how to make that happen. Clearly, she’s not going to be successful in the friends-making department if she follows my example. But what can I do?